He's a Top Gun -- and he does it from his computer

Tuesday

Nov 27, 2007 at 12:01 AMNov 27, 2007 at 8:44 PM

How do you get 15,000 feet up in the air without leaving the ground? Join the Army, and you could find out.

Philip Anselmo

U.S. Army Sgt. Daniel McIntyre flies a plane in the skies of Iraq with the click of a mouse, without ever climbing aboard. He spots roadside bombs from 7,000 feet up while sitting behind a computer miles away.

Officially, the soldier from Phelps is an unmanned-aerial-vehicle operator. “But that doesn’t tell you much,” he says. His reconnaissance aircraft is remote-controlled; his cockpit is a chair in front of a computer screen. This pilot has no panoramic view — in fact he’s flying blind, getting all his directions from controllers. His only flight control is the mouse for his computer screen.

“I won’t say that it is easy to fly, but it isn’t the same or as hard as flying a manned aircraft,” says McIntyre. “We have some of the same instruments as manned aircraft, but instead of using a joystick and pedals, we have the click of a mouse.”

At the same time as McIntyre clicks his mouse to pilot the craft, a soldier working beside him operates a camera mounted to the belly of the plane.

“This takes a lot of concentration because the aircraft is always moving and usually circling the target, so it is like using a camcorder that is spinning,” he said.

On a typical mission, the camera operator scans for IEDs — roadside bombs — and other trouble while the pilot keeps the craft stable and within approved air space. In the seven months he has been stationed in northern Iraq, McIntyre and his comrades have confirmed 25 IEDs — not counting the handful or so each day that are suspected and reported to other units for further inquiry.

McIntyre flies the Shadow, one of three models of unmanned aircraft deployed by the Army, he says. The smallest, the Raven, fits in a sack and is flown by ground troops. The biggest, the Hunter, is about the size of a single-engine Cessna. The Shadow is the middle-of-the road craft, with a wing span of 14 feet, a flight time of about six hours and a ceiling of up to 15,000 feet.

Aside from looking for IEDs, McIntyre pilots the Shadow to scan villages for weapons caches and insurgents. Sometimes, the Shadow escorts combat troops, “whether they are taking incoming rounds, on patrol, or moving in a convoy” says McIntyre.

“We fly an over-watch role and act as their eyes from the sky,” he says. “With our aircraft, we can’t directly engage targets, but we do have a laser that we can use to point out enemy locations to our attack helicopters or ground troops.”

With an everyday bird’s-eye view of the Iraqi landscape around Baqubah, north of Baghdad, McIntyre gets a long-distance peek into native lives. In a day, his camera might sweep over moneyed homes and neighborhoods through to shacks and mud huts without running water or electricity.

At the base, sensory input can come when his eyes are closed.

“Sometimes at night lying in my bunk, I can hear a man singing the call to prayer at a local mosque, and that is something you don’t experience at home,” he says.

His platoon relaxes playing video games or watching movies in a tent when they are not flying. Outside, the wind kicks up the sand that gets into everything but does nothing to tame the 130-degree heat. In fact, it only makes it sharper.

“There are some rivers in the area that we fly over and they produce some green vegetation and palm groves, but for the most part everything is brown,” he says.

McIntyre is about to hit the homestretch of his 15-month deployment. When he gets back home, he plans to move somewhere near Rochester with his wife, Erin, to start their family.

“My wife and I both grew up in the Finger Lakes, and we want to be close to our families so that when we have children they can have the same experiences growing up that we did,” he says.

Philip Anselmo can be reached at (585) 394-0770, Ext. 322, or at panselmo@mpnewspapers.com.